Time-varying volatility in Malaysian stock exchange: An empirical study using multiple-volatility-shift fractionally integrated model

This article investigated the influences of structural breaks on the fractionally integrated time-varying volatility model in the Malaysian stock markets which included the Kuala Lumpur composite index and four major sectoral indices. A fractionally integrated time-varying volatility model combined with sudden changes is developed to study the possibility of structural change in the empirical data sets. Our empirical results showed substantial reduction in fractional differencing parameters after the inclusion of structural change during the Asian financial and currency crises. Moreover, the fractionally integrated model with sudden change in volatility performed better in the estimation and specification evaluations.     

A postcard from the past: The behavior of U.S. stock markets during 1871-1938

In this article, we study the behavior of the stock prices of a subset of eight U.S. industries from the late 1800's to the Great Depression. In particular, we focus on the potential presence of volatility shifts, the persistence of volatility, and on the degree of co-movement of stock returns prior to and during the Great Depression. Our findings show that stock markets became particularly volatile toward the mid 1930's, but that the persistence of volatility tended to decrease around the same time period. In that regard, we find little evidence that such behavior is driven by trading volume. In addition, we conclude that the overall correlation across the different industries was relatively more significant in statistical terms from 1921 to part of the Great Depression (1929-1931; 1933-1934 and 1936).     

Portfolio management under sudden changes in volatility and heterogeneous investment horizons

We analyze the implications for portfolio management of accounting for conditional heteroskedasticity and sudden changes in volatility, based on a sample of weekly data of the Dow Jones Country Titans, the CBT-municipal bond, spot and futures prices of commodities for the period 1992–2005. To that end, we first proceed to utilize the ICSS algorithm to detect long-term volatility shifts, and incorporate that information into PGARCH models fitted to the returns series. At the next stage, we simulate returns series and compute a wavelet-based value at risk, which takes into consideration the investor's time horizon. We repeat the same procedure for artificial data generated from semi-parametric estimates of the distribution functions of returns, which account for fat tails. Our estimation results show that neglecting GARCH effects and volatility shifts may lead to an overestimation of financial risk at different time horizons. In addition, we conclude that investors benefit from holding commodities as their low or even negative correlation with stock and bond indices contribute to portfolio diversification.     

Financial volatility: Issues and measuring techniques

This paper explains in non-technical terms various techniques used to measure volatility ranging from time invariant measures to time variant measures. It is shown that a weakness of the former measures arises from the underlying assumption that volatility is considered to be constant over time. This observation has led researchers to develop time variant measures based on the assumption that volatility changes over time. The introduction of the original ARCH model by Engle has spawned an ever increasing variety of models such as GARCH, EGARCH, NARCH, ARCH-M MARCH and the Taylor-Schwert model. The degree of sophistication employed in developing these models is discussed in detail as are the models characteristics used to capture the underlying economic and financial time series data including volatility clustering, leverage effects and the persistence of volatility itself. A feature of these more elaborate models is that they generally obtain a better fit to the data in-sample.     

Structural changes and volatility transmission in crude oil markets

This study examines the influence of structural changes in volatility on the transmission of information in two crude oil prices. In an effort to assess the impact of these structural changes, we first identify the time points at which structural changes in volatility occurred using the ICSS algorithm, and then incorporate this information into our volatility modeling. From the estimation results using a bi-variate GARCH framework with and without structural change dummies, we find that the degree of persistence of volatility can be reduced via the incorporation of these structural changes in the volatility model. In this direction, we conclude that ignoring structural changes may distort the direction of information inflow and volatility transmission between crude oil markets.     

Modeling financial crisis period: A volatility perspective of Credit Default Swap market

The volatility of financial markets is often assumed constant, but phenomena such as volatility clustering and jumps in volatility suggest that this assumption is rarely true. Numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the jump or breakpoint of the volatility phenomenon, and their findings have been applied in modeling volatility. However, few studies address the issue from a practical point of view. Specifically, a financial crisis accompanied by markedly increased volatility can be approached from this perspective to suggest the persistence or termination of a crisis. This paper develops the ICSS-CRISIS algorithm, a new approach to identify a crisis period along with the conditions for the ICSS algorithm which represents the structural breakpoints of volatility. This algorithm recommends a guideline to determine whether an existing crisis in the market resulted from financial volatility, was terminated, or is continuing. The method is tested along with the ICSS algorithm to prove the effectiveness of Credit Default Swap index data.     

Multifractal diffusion entropy analysis on stock volatility in financial markets

This paper introduces a generalized diffusion entropy analysis method to analyze long-range correlation then applies this method to stock volatility series. The method uses the techniques of the diffusion process and Rényi entropy to focus on the scaling behaviors of regular volatility and extreme volatility respectively in developed and emerging markets. It successfully distinguishes their differences where regular volatility exhibits long-range persistence while extreme volatility reveals anti-persistence.     

Multifractal Behaviors of Stock Indices and Their Ability to Improve Forecasting in a Volatility Clustering Period

The financial market is a complex system, which has become more complicated due to the sudden impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. As a result there may be much higher degree of uncertainty and volatility clustering in stock markets. How does this “black swan” event affect the fractal behaviors of the stock market? How to improve the forecasting accuracy after that? Here we study the multifractal behaviors of 5-min time series of CSI300 and S&P500, which represents the two stock markets of China and United States. Using the Overlapped Sliding Window-based Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (OSW-MF-DFA) method, we found that the two markets always have multifractal characteristics, and the degree of fractal intensified during the first panic period of pandemic. Based on the long and short-term memory which are described by fractal test results, we use the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) neural network model to forecast these indices. We found that during the large volatility clustering period, the prediction accuracy of the time series can be significantly improved by adding the time-varying Hurst index to the GRU neural network.     

The properties and mechanism of long-term memory in nonparametric volatility

Recent empirical literature documents the presence of long-term memory in return volatility. But the mechanism of the existence of long-term memory is still unclear. In this paper, we investigate the origin and properties of long-term memory with nonparametric volatility, using high-frequency time series data of the Chinese Shanghai Composite Stock Price Index. We perform Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) on three different nonparametric volatility estimators with different sampling frequencies. For the same volatility series, the Hurst exponents reduce as the sampling time interval increases, but they are still larger than 1/2, which means that no matter how the interval changes, it still cannot change the existence of long memory. RRV presents a relatively stable property on long-term memory and is less influenced by sampling frequency. RV and RBV have some evolutionary trends depending on time intervals, which indicating that the jump component has no significant impact on the long-term memory property. This suggests that the presence of long-term memory in nonparametric volatility can be contributed to the integrated variance component. Considering the impact of microstructure noise, RBV and RRV still present long-term memory under various time intervals. We can infer that the presence of long-term memory in realized volatility is not affected by market microstructure noise. Our findings imply that the long-term memory phenomenon is an inherent characteristic of the data generating process, not a result of microstructure noise or volatility clustering.     

A study on quantum discord sudden changes

For open quantum systems, quantum discord sudden changes (QDSCs) may appear in the dynamics instead of sudden death appears in quantum entanglement. In this paper, we study the dynamics of quantum discord and explore the relation between the entanglement sudden death and QDSC. We find that the QDSC is sensitive to the initial states and the excitation number in the total system (the qubits  +  environment). By using the geometric measurement of the quantum correlation, the geometric interpretation for the QDSC is presented and the condition for the emergence of the QDSC is given. Furthermore, we observe that the entanglement sudden death and QDSC do not have one to one correspondence for open quantum systems.     

Sudden chaotic transitions in an optically injected semiconductor laser

We study sudden changes in the chaotic output of an optically injected semiconductor laser. For what is believed to be the first time in this system, we identify bifurcations that cause abrupt changes between different chaotic outputs, or even sudden jumps between chaotic and periodic output. These sudden chaotic transitions involve attractors that exist for large regions in parameter space.     

Herding and zero-intelligence agents in the order book dynamics of an artificial double auction market

Effects of herding on the order book dynamics of a double auction market is studied by an agent-based model. This is done by comparing results from a zero-intelligence model and a model in which herding effect is implemented by aggregation of agents who take market orders into opinion groups. The number of opinion groups in a simulation step is determined from previous volatilities of the market as different agents compare the price change over different time intervals. Besides confirming that when herding is included the tail of the distribution of volatility is enhanced, we found several new results. First, the autocorrelation time of volatility is much shorter than the memory of most of the agents because limit orders have strong influence on the location of best bid and best ask. Second, from the relation between bid-ask imbalance and price return we find that herding reduces the chance for a small imbalance to produce a large price change. Furthermore, herding tends to decrease spread. This is because herding decreases the chance that a market order changes the size of the spread. Finally, we find that the relation between spread and volatility in our models does not agree with empirical data, this indicates a difference between agents with no strategies and agents in real financial markets.     

Intraday volatility spillovers between spot and futures indices: Evidence from the Korean stock market

This study provides empirical evidence of the relationship between spot and futures markets in Korea. In particular, the study focuses on the volatility spillover relationship between spot and futures markets by using three high-frequency (10 min, 30 min, and 1 h time-scales) intraday data sets of KOSPI 200 spot and futures contracts. The results indicate a strong bi-directional causal relationship between futures and spot markets, suggesting that return volatility in the spot market can influence that in the futures market and vice versa. Thus, the results indicate that new information is reflected in futures and spot markets simultaneously. This bi-directional causal relationship provides market participants with important guidance on understanding the intraday information transmission between the two markets. Thus, on a given trading day, there may be sudden and sharp increases or decreases in return volatility in the Korean stock market as a result of positive feedback and synchronization of spot and futures markets.     

Clustering of volatility as a multiscale phenomenon

The dynamics of prices in financial markets has been studied intensively both experimentally (data analysis) and theoretically (models). Nevertheless, a complete stochastic characterization of volatility is still lacking. What is well known is that absolute returns have memory on a long time range, this phenomenon is known as clustering of volatility. In this paper we show that volatility correlations are power-laws with a non-unique scaling exponent. This kind of multiscale phenomenology has some analogies with fully developed turbulence and disordered systems and it is now pointed out for financial series. Starting from historical returns series, we have also derived the volatility distribution, and the results are in agreement with a log-normal shape. In our study, we consider the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), daily composite index closes (January 1966 to June 1998) and the US Dollar/Deutsche Mark (USD-DM) noon buying rates certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (October 1989 to September 1998). Received 1 February 2000     

Statistical distribution and time correlation of stock returns runs

In this paper, we focus on the statistical features and time correlation of runs which is defined as a sequence of consecutive gain/loss (rise/fall) stock returns. By studying daily data of the Dow Jones industrial average (DJIA), we get the following points: firstly, the distribution of length and magnitude of stock returns runs both follow an exponential law; secondly, runs length do lack significant time correlation, while runs magnitude exhibit a slow decay of time correlation with long persistence up to several months, which implies existence of volatility clustering. We expect the above properties may add new members to the family of stylized facts about stock returns.     

Relaxation dynamics of aftershocks after large volatility shocks in the SSEC index

The relaxation dynamics of aftershocks after large volatility shocks are investigated based on two high-frequency data sets of the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite (SSEC) index. Compared with previous relevant work, we have defined main financial shocks based on large volatilities rather than large crashes. We find that the occurrence rate of aftershocks with the magnitude exceeding a given threshold for both daily volatility (constructed using 1-minute data) and minutely volatility (using intra-minute data) decays as a power law. The power-law relaxation exponent increases with the volatility threshold and is significantly greater than 1. Taking financial volatility as the counterpart of seismic activity, the power-law relaxation in financial volatility deviates remarkably from the Omori law in Geophysics.     

Information Geometric Theory in the Prediction of Abrupt Changes in System Dynamics

Detection and measurement of abrupt changes in a process can provide us with important tools for decision making in systems management. In particular, it can be utilised to predict the onset of a sudden event such as a rare, extreme event which causes the abrupt dynamical change in the system. Here, we investigate the prediction capability of information theory by focusing on how sensitive information-geometric theory (information length diagnostics) and entropy-based information theoretical method (information flow) are to abrupt changes. To this end, we utilise a non-autonomous Kramer equation by including a sudden perturbation to the system to mimic the onset of a sudden event and calculate time-dependent probability density functions (PDFs) and various statistical quantities with the help of numerical simulations. We show that information length diagnostics predict the onset of a sudden event better than the information flow. Furthermore, it is explicitly shown that the information flow like any other entropy-based measures has limitations in measuring perturbations which do not affect entropy.     

Modeling volatility changes in the 10-year Treasury

This paper examines the daily volatility of changes in the 10-year Treasury note utilizing the iterated cumulative sums of squares algorithm [C. Inclan, G. Tiao, Use of cumulative sums of squares for retrospective detection of changes of variance, J. Am. Stat. Assoc. 89 (1994) 913–923]. The ICSS algorithm can detect regime shifts in the volatility of the interest rate changes. A general model allows for endogenously determined changes in variance while the more restrictive model forces the variance to follow the same process throughout the sample period. A comparison of the out-of-sample volatility forecasting performance of two competing models is made using asymmetric error measures. The asymmetric error statistics penalize models for under- or over-predicting volatility. The results shed light on the importance of ignoring volatility regime shifts when performing out-of-sample forecasts. The findings are important to financial market participants who require accurate forecasts of future volatility in order to implement and evaluate asset performance.     

Forecasting volatility of fuel oil futures in China: GARCH-type,SV or realized volatility models?

In most previous works on forecasting oil market volatility, squared daily returns were taken as the proxy of unobserved actual volatility. However, as demonstrated by Andersen and Bollerslev (1998) [22], this proxy with too high measurement noise could be perfectly outperformed by a so-called realized volatility (RV) measure calculated by the cumulative sum of squared intraday returns. With this motivation, we further extend earlier works by employing intraday high-frequency data to compare the performance of three typical volatility models in the daily out-of-sample volatility forecasting of fuel oil futures on the Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE): the GARCH-type, stochastic volatility (SV) and realized volatility models. By taking RV as the proxy of actual daily volatility and then computing forecasting errors, we find that the realized volatility model based on intraday high-frequency data produces significantly more accurate volatility forecasts than the GARCH-type and SV models based on daily returns. Furthermore, the SV model outperforms many linear and nonlinear GARCH-type models that capture long-memory volatility and/or the asymmetric leverage effect in volatility. These results also prove that abundant volatility information is available in intraday high-frequency data, and can be used to construct more accurate oil volatility forecasting models.     

Modelling financial volatility in the presence of abrupt changes

The volatility of financial instruments is rarely constant, and usually varies over time. This creates a phenomenon called volatility clustering, where large price movements on one day are followed by similarly large movements on successive days, creating temporal clusters. The GARCH model, which treats volatility as a drift process, is commonly used to capture this behaviour. However research suggests that volatility is often better described by a structural break model, where the volatility undergoes abrupt jumps in addition to drift. Most efforts to integrate these jumps into the GARCH methodology have resulted in models which are either very computationally demanding, or which make problematic assumptions about the distribution of the instruments, often assuming that they are Gaussian. We present a new approach which uses ideas from nonparametric statistics to identify structural break points without making such distributional assumptions, and then models drift separately within each identified regime. Using our method, we investigate the volatility of several major stock indexes, and find that our approach can potentially give an improved fit compared to more commonly used techniques.